2: Underneath A Thousand Skies

199 Vixen Above, Mensao Below (13)

Wen Yan was not bitten, but because of her tussle with the zombie just now, she had a large scrape on her arm. When she took a look at it, the skin was torn and blood dripped down her elbow, looking very painful.

Sheng Li prepared to tear off the hem of her clothes to make a makeshift bandage.

"Yanyan, wait a while, I'll clean it up."

Song Jia looked at Ye Minzhe who was standing from the side. "Didn't you have a roll of gauze earlier?"

Ye Minzhe blinked. He scratched his head and looked innocently at her. "Did I?"

Song Jia was speechless. He was so proud about having watched ER Doctors earlier, but now that there was an injured person right in front of him, he didn't want to treat her.

She went towards him and inserted her hand into his front pocket, pulling out the roll of gauze. She slapped it onto his chest.

"Ye Minzhe, don't be selfish."

Ye Minzhe puffed up his cheeks. It wasn't that he didn't want to help them, but because he only got this one roll of gauze. What if Ye Jia got herself hurt in the future and didn't have any bandages to use? Compared to other insignificant people, shouldn't he think of her first?

Under Song Jia's disdainful eyes, Ye Minzhe finally gave a sigh of defeat. "Alright, I'll go help them."

Ye Minzhe knelt in front of the two girls and took Wen Yan's arm.

"Let me help." His tone didn't sound good in the slightest, almost grumbling. He lifted Wen Yan's arm and observed at the scrape. "We need to clean it first."

"Here." Gu Yuan appeared beside him, holding a bottle of water. "I picked it up not far from here."

While Ye Minzhe was treating Wen Yan's wounds, Song Jia studied the corpses of the zombies he had killed. She crouched over one of them and tilted her head.

Their blood was thick and viscous, almost custard-like. There were wounds all over their body, and some of it were fatal. Song Jia noticed that even before Ye Minzhe had bashed their brains, they were already starting to decompose. This meant that at some point while they being were infected by the virus, their immune system had been crippled, and their bodies were experiencing a slow death.

Song Jia propped her chin with her hand as she thought hard.

There was a study she had once read which proved that after a person's heart stopped beating, the brain would still be active for hours afterwards. This was why those who had gone through a near-death experience and had their heart revived after a few minutes would remember the conversations going around him even though he was technically 'dead.'

Did the zombie virus work the same way? With blood as viscous as that, their circulatory systems couldn't possibly work, and following that thought, neither could their heart. Blood was essential to deliver nutrients to the body, so if there were no nutrients, how could their wounds heal?

No, Song Jia shook her head.

Zombies craved human flesh, treating them as food. Which meant that they were getting nutrients, just enough to continue cell division, but not for repairs and restoration. This was why zombies looked like decaying corpses, vastly appearing different from a healthy human being.

"Jia."

A pair of hands covered her eyes.

"Jia, didn't I tell you not to look? What are you thinking so hard about?"

Ye Minzhe's dissatisfied voice was heard behind her ear. He didn't really know why she was looking at a gory corpse for too long. He had killed them so quickly because she was watching, not daring to pull any tricks and just killing them as soon as possible to not give her nightmares. But this girl didn't appreciate his efforts.

These kind of messy things, she shouldn't be allowed to see.

"I'm fine," Song Jia said, pushing away his hands and standing up. She looked over at Wen Yan, whose arm was covered by a thin strip of gauze. She compared it to the thick bandage around her wrist.

Song Jia, "..."

Should she feel flattered?

Since the group of zombies were taken care of, they went over to the promenade deck to check out the lifeboats. Gu Yuan discussed with Sheng Li and Wen Yan what they knew about the situation of their other classmates.

"A group of us were hanging out inside Sheng Li's room on Deck 11 when the ship shook and the power went out," Wen Yan said, rubbing at her smeared mascara. "When we went outside to check things, other people were going out of their cabins and complaining too. Most of them were really confused about what was going on, but Sheng Li and I didn't really care. We just wanted to stay inside the room and play with our phones. But the rest of our friends wanted to find the staff and complain."

Song Jia understood the hidden meaning in her words. The prestigious school where Ye Jia went to were made up of rich kids, but even there, a social hierarchy still existed. A case in point was how a single Ye Minzhe could stay in the regent suite, while Sheng Li could only occupy a cabin on Deck 11.

Sheng Li and Wen Yan's parents were what you would call 'next door millionaires.' They belonged to the group of professors, lawyers, surgeons, real estate brokers, and car dealers who have highly paid jobs and use their money wisely. They account for about for about 7% of the households in the country.

This was the reason why Sheng Li and Wen Yan were content to stay in their room, unlike their friends who immediately became discontented and wanted to complain to the higher management.

The parents of this group of friends probably belonged to the 'capitalist class.' They belonged to the top 0.9% of household income, and earned at least 350,000 USD to 500,000 USD, about 3,342,300 yuan. Capitalist class members usually don't require their labor to generate profits. They could spend half of the year in the south of France, give generously to charity, drive a Mercedes, and send their kids abroad without so much as blinking an eye.

Standing financially higher than them was Ding Xiuxiu, who had a luxury suite on Deck 16. She had what you would call 'glittering rich' parents. They generate extremely high incomes, have vast sums of wealth at their disposal, and spend accordingly on high prestige cars, mansions, dinner every night at 3,000 yuan-plus per person restaurants, couture attire, and the like. 

No matter what they spend their money on, it would still just be a fraction of their overall net worth. They could basically walk sideways anywhere they went and no one would dare say half a word.

Of course, there was no need to mention Ye Minzhe's little group of friends. Long Aotian, Ouyang Che, and Gong Qiye's parents all have an uncrowned title of being the 'richest of the rich.' In effect, they were a small number of upper class families who effectively represent the top 0.01% of wealth in the population and literally receive 5% of the entire income of the nation. They are the people who control newspapers, banks, consumer product companies, theme parks, and real estate empires, with assets of roughly more than 100 million USD.

And for Ye Minzhe to be their leader, one could just imagine how much wealth the Ye family held. Having been listed as a member of global billionaires, the Ye family belonged to the apex of wealth. There was no need to say the amount of assets under their name, as this would only make people faint in anger.